I'd like to run kismet on an OpenBSD-4.8 firewall that has the X package installed but X is not set to run at boot time. "make build" fails because X is not running, but the kismet page says kismet is ncurses based. Shouldn't it be able to build and run without X? How might I break Makefile to get it to build?

First, why are you building? Why not simply install the package pointing PKG_PATH to a mirror?

Why did you install X on a firewall?

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"make build" fails because X is not running,

Untrue. Nothing in the ports tree requires X to be running. What is required by a number of ports is for the X libraries to be present. In fact, you can determine kismet's dependencies by the following (assuming the ports tree is installed...):

It should be noted.. the developers have stated on the lists several times that a lot of ports/packages require the X11 sets for libraries at run-time/compile-time.

Actually, the admonition is much stronger. Section 15.4.1 states that building ports is not supported without X installed.

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They don't really take up much space, so it doesn't hurt to install them.. especially if you plan on installing packages.

While I don't suspect that you are confusing build requirements with installation, installing kismet through the package circumvents any need for X at all. While the presence of X isn't entirely verboten, numerous project developers have also advocated not installing it if not necessary. Yet, this is simply a preference for minimalism, not a requirement.

Indeed. After a real look-see rather than my lame memory I did not have X installed, so I set things up for packages and installed kismet that way. Works fine albeit anti-climactic. I originally went for ports out of habit as that's what I use on most of my machines since they are FreeBSD.